Thursday, September 29, 2005

This is Going To Be A Problem

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - Republican members of Congress say there are signs that the Defense Department may be carrying out new intelligence activities through programs intended to escape oversight from Congress and the new director of national intelligence.The warnings are an unusually public signal of some Republican lawmakers' concern about overreaching by the Pentagon, where top officials have been jockeying with the new intelligence chief, John D. Negroponte, for primacy in intelligence operations. The lawmakers said they believed that some intelligence activities, involving possible propaganda efforts and highly technological initiatives, might be masked as so-called special access programs, the details of which are highly classified.SNIPEven under the new structure headed by Mr. Negroponte, the Pentagon's activities are widely understood to make up about 80 percent of an annual intelligence budget whose details remain classified but that is widely understood to total about $80 billion a year.SNIPIn the interview, Rep Hoekstra (R-MI) said the committee had been told that the Pentagon was creating parallel structures "so they don't have to deal with the D.N.I.," the abbreviation for the new intelligence chief.

So much for one central director in control of our intelligence apparatus and the move to sort out the problem of stove-piping of intelligence. We can look forward to more redundancy and I'm sure DoD will not be sharing intelligence from programs they don't even want to admit exist or render to oversight. Then there is the cost. $80 Billion and this is what we get?Stove Piping?Redundancy?No oversight?Are these not the problems which contributed to 9/11?Do you feel safer now?